Susan Rice is attacked by the same conservatives who defended Condoleezza Rice: Editorial

Susan Rice, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.HENNY RAY ABRAMS/AFP/Getty Images

The continuing flap over Susan Rice is drumming up flashbacks of Condoleezza Rice, who falsely told us Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Suddenly, conservative critics look like hypocrites.

As “Daily Show” funny-man Jon Stewart noted, all it takes is an archived video of another African-American woman named Rice, nominated for secretary of state, giving us intelligence we now know to be wrong, to turn the tables on the likes of John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

After catching wind that President Obama may nominate Susan Rice, now United Nations ambassador, to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, those two Republican senators attacked her credibility full-force, swearing they’d do anything in their power to stop her nomination.

The GOP peanut gallery quickly chimed in. This uproar was based solely on what she said on the morning talk shows just days after the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that resulted in four dead Americans.

When Rice sat for those interviews, she was speaking off unclassified talking points she was given by the CIA. Based on that information and using lots of caveats, she said the attack had apparently originated out of a peaceful protest.

Now, we know it didn’t. There was no protest, only a planned attack by a local militant group called Ansar al-Shariah, with possible links to al Qaeda. But before Rice went on those shows, the CIA took references to terrorism out of her talking points and declared them classified.

There’s no reason to believe that Rice had any role in deliberately misleading the American public. Conservatives are still holding her to blame, though.

Which is not at all what happened when President Bush nominated Condoleezza Rice as the nation’s top diplomat. By that time, everyone knew she’d given us false information that justified the U.S. invasion of Iraq:

Saddam “has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon,” Rice had said, adding that dramatic quip, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

This led us into a war that cost trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives. But no matter. Both McCain and Graham later strongly defended Condoleezza Rice’s nomination as secretary of state, and all their Republican colleagues present voted unanimously to confirm her.

Same job, same race, same gender, same last name, even — but a much bigger mistake. And, not incidentally, a different political party.